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Sunday, February 13, 2011

Slow fast animation

I just got through the first draft of Scene 07 - Building Crash (actually about 20 different edits). So far, this has been the hardest part to animate. Part of it was that it takes place is a glum looking city, and I got tired of looking at it about 2 hours into animation (not a good sign?)

But the bigger factor is that this is one of the fastest paced scenes in the animation, where the Mother draws a gun on the pretty daughter and the ugly daughter convinces her sister to flee and then tries to calm the enraged Mother. To keep up a sense of tension, this scene needs to have many fast edits and fast action. A lot of the action is also fairly exaggerated. So the net result is that it took me a LONG time (comparatively) to animate a relatively short sequence of shots.

I've also found that animating this way feels very similar to writing a character driven story. I've become so close and invested to these characters and, let's face it, the Mother is not a pleasant person. So it's been hard spending so much time with her because I just want to sort of shake and her tell her to not be such a jerk. Meanwhile, I also want to shake the daughters and yell at them to get the hell away from this psychopath! Fortunately, that's exactly what's happened now, although the ugly daughter is still with the Mother for some scenes yet.

Now I'm on to the scene that's still the least clear to me, the Vampire River. I still haven't figured out what I want the vampire/sea monster/child molester creatures to look like, although I have a lot of ideas. I'm gonna try out diatom-ish critters this week. There's also the bridge of human arms, and I'm seriously considering doing some stop-motion for that, but I don't know if it's a good idea to throw in too many different styles of animation. Anyway, I'm still debating, basically.

But passing the city, really, the first (and primary) climax of the story, sets me at the more-than-half-way point. It doesn't feel that way yet, because I still have the second half to animate plus all the sounds, etc., and I still haven't figured out how I want to animate the Mother's tail. Anyway, better problems to have, now that I've muscled through that crummy scene. And I'm sure my husband's going to be glad for it too, because I think he was a getting a little sick and tired of me whining about it, ha!